Wikipedia talk:Sockpuppet investigations

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Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Xebulon and Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Hetoum I

I wanted to solicit further opinions from other clerks and checkusers regarding these tangled messes of investigation. As far as I can tell, the same group of users accuse the same opposing group of being sockpuppets. Nothing has ever come of this. Frankly, I think it's disruptive and pointless and am inclined to decline these on sight. Geopolitical disputes cause enough editing problems in article space -I'm loathe to see the same sniping here. What do others think? TNXMan 17:59, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I got a note on my talk page about it. This whole thing is, quite frankly, a clusterfuck, and I don't really think SPI should be involved in dealing with factional fights like that. Further, this all falls under WP:ARBAA2, so I kinda feel like they're trying to circumvent that process and are instead coming to us for blocks. At this point I'm increasingly becoming convinced that declining those cases is a good idea. — HelloAnnyong ^{(say whaaat?!)} 02:12, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

It's not quite true that nothing has ever come of it. As I look through the archives, I do see the odd sockpuppet blocked here and there. Would it be possible to restrict the originators of the reports? I could see a case for an SPI topic ban against people that frequently cry wolf.—Kww(talk) 04:30, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't know if I'm allowed to post here, so feel free to remove my comment if it is not appropriate at this board. I just want to bring to your attention that this is the first time that I file an SPI request on those particular accounts. The last time I filed an SPI request was in March 2011, so I don't think that I do this too often. Plus, most of SPIs that I filed returned positive results, so I don't do it without a good reason. And I don't think that your colleague Golbez is abusing SPI board either. As he himself pointed out, he does it very rarely. This particular SPI request was by coincidence filed simultaneously by two editors, myself and admin Golbez. Now if two totally unrelated editors felt the need to ask for an SPI, and those accounts have already caused suspicions of other editors, then I believe there must be strong evidence that leads all those people, including an admin, to ask for an investigation. And calling me and Golbez "the same group of editors" is really wrong, I have nothing in common with this admin, on the contrary, very often we had our disagreements with regard to the content of the article in question. And some of the previous reports were also filed by people not related to the sides of the dispute, for instance The Devil's Advocate. It's just that there's strong evidence pointing at connection between certain accounts, which forces the people to file the requests repeatedly. I noted in my request that I don't want the SPI to be limited to CU only, I also wanted the admins to look at the behavioral evidence. But unfortunately this was not done. If a bunch of recently created, long inactive or new accounts pop up one after another within a short period of time to rv or comment on a certain article that already was a subject to a number of arbitration cases (Nagorno-Karabakh), it does not appear to be a mere coincidence. Grandmaster 19:22, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Since I have been contributing to Wikipedia in articles that contain information to Armenia and Azerbaijan I'm aware of this problem that Grandmaster and Tnxman307 speak of, I see two different groups of users coordinating to get each-others view across in a page. I tried helping out the page called Ermenikend, I combined both names to make users satisfied, but the contributors just kept switching back and forth to one name. As for check user, by restricting reports would cause this problem to get twice as worse as it is. Maybe giving it a time limit to make reports for example bi-weekly minimum, would help stop a overflow of reports but just stopping it for a extended time would be a issue to people contributing to articles. This is my opinion from the observations I made on the Armenian and Azerbaijan topics in the past week. In a short period of time I've noticed alot of disruptive users, which seem to be a big coordination of groups, this was just my two cents I'd like to share, hope it helped! thank you.Nocturnal781 (talk) 08:07, 10 February 2012 (UTC)